My website's domain is not resolving after ≈60 hours. The test link from the hosting service is working fine. The nameservers are correctly assigned over at my registrar. What gives?

OK, I'm new to this whole webmastering thing, and I'm a bit confused. I registered a domain with NameCheap early last week, and signed up for hosting over at LaughingSquid. I went over to NameCheap and set my domain's DNS hosting to the servers indicated by LaughingSquid, NS1.LAUGHINGSQUID.NET and NS2.LAUGHINGSQUID.NET. This was on Friday. It's now Monday, and I can't access my site.

The hosting page that Laughing Squid has for me over at websitesettings.com has a temporary link (a subdomain of websitesettings.com) which works fine and shows the "Hello World" index page. Also, if I do a WHOIS on my domain I get a whois record which lists the laughingsquid DNS servers. Still, I can't access my site through its domain.

I'm not sure what's going on here and I don't know how to proceed. I have a help desk ticket in at LaughingSquid but I figure you guys are likely to respond a heck of a lot faster. If anyone can help, I'd love some advice.

If you drop the domain name here it might help. You can do a nslookup here http://network-tools.com/nslook/

That tells you which IP your domain is currently assigned. Take that IP and drop it back into that same tool, see if it gets a laughing squid server.posted by bitdamaged at 10:42 AM on October 17, 2011

For example I drop bitdamaged.com in there and I get 69.163.250.229, I take that IP number and drop it back in here

And I get xxx.xxx.dreamhost.com where dreamhost is my current host.posted by bitdamaged at 10:45 AM on October 17, 2011

BTW The Whois stuff looks correct which lifts the burden off namecheap, this looks like a laughingsquid issue. Could be two places, 1. Laughinsquid doesn't have the DNS properly configured, or 2 doesn't have the named virtual host set up correctly. If the name -> IP -> name trick gives you back a launghing squid host then its probably problem 2.

Note the name --> IP --> name thing isn't guaranteed (it might point to some strange hostname thats not "laughingsquid.com").posted by bitdamaged at 10:48 AM on October 17, 2011

I wasn't sure if it was cool to drop domain names (especially since I might eventually make some money off of this) but it's just at the Hello World stage so, sure. The domain is designconsensus.org.

If the mods want, I'll shift that over to my profile. I have done an nslookup and got nothing back, "Name server failed".posted by Scientist at 10:50 AM on October 17, 2011

This points to a problem with your domain registration, not DNS. This is the kind of error you'd get if your domain registration expired, for instance.

Go back to namecheap and ensure your domain is registered correctly, and spelled correctly.posted by odinsdream at 10:57 AM on October 17, 2011

Definitely spelled correctly and I don't see anything fishy about the registration (I only *paid* for it a week ago, shouldn't be expired!). Also I should mention that I briefly had it pointed to wordpress.com's nameservers, and that worked fine after a day or so of propagating. Switching it to LaughingSquid's nameservers seems to have borked it, though.posted by Scientist at 11:03 AM on October 17, 2011

You know, I'm actually incorrect about that registration part. NXDOMAIN could also be caused by the designated nameserver not having your zone record. That would be at laughingsquid.

You could switch DNS back to NameCheap, and just plug in the records manually to point web requests to LaughingSquid. After doing so, go to the left-hand menu and look for "All Host Records" under Host Management. Put the LaughingSquid IP address into the box for the "www" record.

I actually prefer this method since I retain control over the records, making it easier to migrate to new webhosts or deliver e-mail to one place and web-hosting to another.posted by odinsdream at 11:08 AM on October 17, 2011

So, talk to laughingsquid.net -- it looks like, even if the ns1.* and ns2.* are set up correctly with your domain registrar, ns1.laughingsquid.net doesn't have the domain zone file set up properly and isn't responding to dns queries for your domain name.posted by AzraelBrown at 11:15 AM on October 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Echoing AzaraelBrown. It looks like the problem is on laughingsquid's end.
Look at the 2nd failure on the dnssy report - their servers did not respond.posted by fragmede at 11:21 AM on October 17, 2011

AzraelBrown; that's an interesting query response - I wonder why it's appending your own domain to the reply? I get the same thing, designconsensus.org.ourdomain.ourcompany.com: REFUSED.

I left my BIND DNS book at home - but maybe this happens if they don't put the trailing period after ".org" in the zone file?posted by odinsdream at 11:25 AM on October 17, 2011

I took off the "." from an A record in the zone file on my own DNS server, and this is the response I got:

I'm running BIND, but there's a variety of other DNS servers that may respond differently; the REFUSED was more interesting to me -- their DNS must be set to only respond to domain names that it thinks are local. My guess is LaughingSquid doesn't have the domain name set up -- or maybe they have it misspelled in their records.

Scientist: if you have some sort of control panel to set up your own DNS manually with LaughingSquid, you might be missing some records -- make sure there's at least one A record for the domain itself, and an A or maybe a CNAME for the www.* subdomain. You should be able to resolve even if there's no A for the domain name itself sans subdomains, but their DNS might be choking at that point.posted by AzraelBrown at 11:42 AM on October 17, 2011

Turns out to be a stupid error on my part. LaughingSquid got back to me and said that since I was on one of their cloud hosting programs I should use a different set of DNS servers, which they gave me the addresses to. So it should be all cleared up!

Sorry for wasting everyone's time (and my question for the week), but thank you all for your valiant efforts in puzzling this out for me.posted by Scientist at 12:37 PM on October 17, 2011

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